On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 21:58 +0100, Claus Reinke wrote:

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- some entries '/', some use '\\', some use a combination of '/' and *unescaped* '\' (the latter two come from ghc's cabal configure run either with or without --prefix)

That's fine. They use \\ when using Haskell String format. When not then windows accepts both \ and / as path separators, it's not an escape char.

Since windows is so forgiving, why not be consistent and always use '/'?

We do. But if someone passes Cabal a path containing '\' then we don't interpret or check it, we just use it.

That also reduces the number of escapes as well as the danger of missing escapes when going via several levels of shells/interpretation. Only the double quotes to protect spaces remain necessary.

The convention everywhere in Cabal (and in the ghc-pkg registration files) is to allow Haskell String syntax. It's only essential when one wants to use characters that would otherwise be interpreted as separators.

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It's not strictly necessary for ghc-pkg to know where index files are that cover various packages but it would be nice to do something better there. People ask for Cabal to maintain an index over all packages though it's not clear where it should put this.

For context: I've just extended the haskellmode plugins for Vim to handle docs for libraries outside code+extra (not yet online), and while it was no big deal working around all those inconsistencies, it certainly seemed unnecessary and ugly.

Right now, only core+extralibs have a unified index, and that can be found by all kinds of ugly guesses (though ghc-paths will help there in the future). Once Cabal generates and maintains a master index, perhaps there could simply be a standard file pointing to it, in the haddock-html dirs?

It would not be per-package of course so I don't think it makes sense to put it in package registration files. Duncan